Dream of Waking Ne Cede Malis

Spam

I live with spam. I'm a spam magnet. I've been getting smarter about who to give my email address to and where to post it and I'm still swimming in spam. I've tried two ways of combating spam.

First was Popfile. It's a middleman that goes between your email client and your email server and resides on your computer. It's platform independant so you can use it just as easily with Outlook as you can with any other obscure email program you can come up with. You get to it trhough a browser based interface. It's sole function is to sort email so you can go crazy and classify every email you get into a hundred different categories or it can be as simple as spam and notspam. Combine this with a simple email client filter (Popfile has the option to mark emails by their classification) to kick out everything Popfile labels as spam and you'll never even see it. In the beginning it takes some training to get going but after that you get very few false positives. It's rather effective. The drawbacks are that it's a middleman program so when your email stops working, it's one more step to troubleshoot and obviously if you don't watch your trash you could easily miss some false positives and the browser interface isn't as simple as an integrated email client solution.

My other option was just that, Mozilla Thunderbird's built-in spam filter. Once you turn it on it'll put mail you mark as spam in the folder of your choosing. Marking spam is built into the client so there's no middleman. It's all very easy to set up and get running. Unfortunately it's either entirely too precautious about false positives or it's simply not very effective. With Popfile I'd go days without seeing a piece of spam slip through the cracks, with Thunderbird's built-in filter I've been kicking out spam on a daily basis if I'm lucky. If I'm unlucky (and this is often the case when I come back from retrans), half of the mail that ends up in my inbox is unmarked spam. Okay, that's not entirely fair. Maybe a quarter of my mail would be unmarked spam but it's easily a lot more than Popfile would let slip past.

I'm going back to Popfile. Thunderbird's spam filter is easy enough for mom and pop and Popfile definitely isn't the easiest solution but it works well and in hindsight is well worth the effort to get it running. I am doing one thing different though, I'm dropping all my categories for two, spam and notspam. I never found myself with a need to have everything so organized.

Sidenote: In typing this, I typed "Popefile" at every occurance of "Popfile". If I could get the Pontiff to sort my email, I think he'd do an okay job.